Found the Right Candidate? Ask These 8 Questions First

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Your job description is specific and clear. You involved all the relevant staff and managers in the selection process. You screened out unqualified candidates. You completed dozens of interviews. You asked excellent interview questions.

Sure, you have a gut feeling, guts have been known to be wrong. So how do you know if you’ve found the right candidate? Looking beyond the specific job skills and experience, here are a few final factors to consider for any new hire:

Is the candidate highly adaptive?Agility, the capacity to think on your feet and take on new roles and embrace new ways of thinking, are critical in an ever-changing environment.

Did the candidate ask great questions? Not the ones they prepared in advance. The ones that occurred during the interview that showed they can listen, synthesize and ask thoughtful questions about the heart of your business.

Are they curious?What else do they want to know? Are they lit up with questions? A great employee needs to be a great learner, being voraciously curious is key to high productivity and breakthrough thinking.

Can they connect the dots? Being able to see patterns in disparate information and make sense of mountains of data without being overwhelmed is a valuable organizational trait for complex organizations.

Are they team players? Are they comfortable in the role of Chief or Indian? They need to believe that their thinking is improved by collaboration and diversity.

Are they enthusiastic about people and relationships?Kind of a no-brainer, but good reminder that enthusiastic people tend to generate positive feelings and productive energy for their projects and initiatives.

Can they admit to mistakes? Can they easily describe three failures, and what they learned from them? Be concerned if they can’t bring a few mistakes to mind.

Do they see learning as pleasure?Great candidates are eager and rapid learners, and they pursue learning on their own.

Powers Resource Center knows how important the selection and hiring process is. That’s why we recently expanded our talent management capability with a new selection assessment tool called PXT Select™. You can’t only rely on gut instinct when making hiring decisions and too many organizations make crucial hiring decisions based solely on impressions rather than data. We are using this new hiring assessment with clients and it is incredibly valuable as part of the hiring process because it provides insightful, actionable data about candidates. Get in touch with us to learn more.

Learn About the 5 Behaviors of A Cohesive Team

“Your most valuable asset in creating the results you want is your people. And we know people. Knowing people and how they behave, engage, thrive and operate as leaders and on teams is how we make our living, so we’ve gotten pretty darn good at it.

Our commitment to you is to serve as a catalyst for extraordinary change. To deliver the kind of results that make you want to do the happy dance. To be the business partner that takes your team collaboration, employee engagement, leadership development and coaching to the next level.

Whatever your goal, you can be sure that it’s ours too.”

-Tara Powers, Founder and CEO

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